Monday, March 7, 2011
Armwood Jazz Blog: Duke Ellington, Before My Time
And I learned to arrive early to performances. While the set would hold for some late- arriving "stars," Duke would often sit at the piano, improvising intriguing stories, sometimes simultaneously starting a new composition.
After I became New York editor of Down Beat in 1953, I talked quite often with Duke, and was instructed not alone in music ("Don't listen by category, but to individuals") but likewise in his deep interest in the story of his mass in this land, which became partly of his music.
In 1957, I was really surprised and honored when the RCA Records label asked me, with Duke's approval, to take and save the notes for a compilation, later titled "In A Mellotone," of 1940-42 sides-previously unreleased on album-by what was so regarded internationally as his especially nonpareil orchestra. I felt I had been knighted.
Getty Images
'Chord changes? Listen, sweetie.'
Having treasured his music of that period, I knew little of his earliest recordings on other labels until now, with the dismissal of the invaluably illuminating "The Complete 1932-1940 Brunswick, Columbia and Master Recordings of Duke Ellington and His Famous Orchestra" (Mosaic), produced by Scott Wenzel and Steven Lasker. The latter also wrote the deeply researched and absorbing liner notes that are of lasting measure to global listeners, including jazz historians of the Ellington phenomenon.
Mosaic's overall executive director is Michael Cuscuna, who has developed jazz reissues into a high art. He and his team search unremittingly for the original masters and then contact the surviving participating musicians to ensure discographic accuracy. They also take charge of all licensing requirements and payments to the musicians' estates. Anything on the Mosaic label is-in jazz parlance-"in the pocket."
As Mr. Lasker notes, when the first recordings in this set were made in February 1932, Duke was about 33. He had come to New York from his hometown of Washington nine days earlier with his five-piece combo, Duke Ellington's Washingtonians. The band continued expanding, reaching eight musicians by 1927. The Ellington impact was being felt strongly at Harlem's Cotton Club. At the same time, he was first to be heard nationally on the radio. (Being only 2 at the time, I missed those broadcasts.)
During the summer of 1929, the orchestra appeared in Florenz Ziegfeld's revue "Showgirl." Its performance roused that legendary producer to visit the orchestra "the finest exponent of syncopated music in existence. . . . Some of the best exponents of new music who have heard them during rehearsal almost jumped out of their seats over their extraordinary harmonies and exciting rhythms."
Now, thanks to Mosaic, I have almost jumped out of my place because the audio engineering by Mr. Lasker and Andreas Meyer brings these Ellington orchestras swinging right into the room. As Billy Strayhorn (eventually Ellington's associate arranger) put it in Down Beat in 1952: "Ellington plays the piano, but his real instrument is the band. Each extremity of the set is to him a distinctive tone colour and set of emotions, which he mixes with others equally distinctive to get a third thing, which I anticipate the Ellington Effect." That characteristic sound is as present in these recordings as it would subsequently be in the forties and beyond.
Long ago, Duke explained to me: "A musician's sound is his soul, his entire personality. I see that voice as I make to write, and that's how I am able to write." And he added, smiling, "I know their strengths and weaknesses."
He did receive a penchant for one part of the orchestra. "Duke loves his brass," sidemen would order me, and throughout these recordings, you see how gladdened his face made him, as he would smile broadly when they drove the ensemble. Also, while his lot was his instrument, he was a spurring accompanist on the piano.
With the orchestra as his instrument, this appeal is an aural kaleidoscope: tone colors, rhythms and tempos of longing, romance, an exultant life force, urgent love and, of course, what he memorialized in his song, "It Don't Think a Thing (If It Ain't Got that Swing)."
Among the surprises is the singer in "St. Louis Blues" on record one. At first I couldn't tell who it was. He surely had lived the blues, fitted right into the set and knew how to scat sing. Then it hit me. It was a young, grooving Bing Crosby.
To younger listeners, two of Duke's vocalists during those years may be new: the vividly magnetic Ivie Anderson, and Adelaide Hall. So is a guest, the largely forgotten Ethel Waters, who moved so deep into the lyrics that her singing had the king of autobiography. Mosaic should yield a boxed set of her career.
Relatively few sidemen left the orchestra. One who did, Ben Webster, told newcomer tenor-saxophonist Harold Ashby: "Vibe the Governor and Rab [Duke and Johnny Hodges] a slight smile from me. Now you'll get your Ph.D. in medicine because you're with the Boss."
I asked Duke what he looked for when he was screening replacements. "He has to recognize how to listen," he said.
Trombonist Buster Cooper explained what this meant in my book, "American Music Is.": "I first united the circle in a recording studio. He was writing and said to me: 'Buster, I desire you to take eight choruses on this tune.'
"I said, 'Fine, but where's the chord changes?' Duke said, 'Chord changes? Listen, sweetie.'"
Duke was always listening intently to the audience. "At a dance," he said to me, "when [alto saxophonist] Johnny Hodges is singing a love story in a ballad, there's sometimes a sigh from someone in the audience. That sigh becomes part of our music."
In 1966 Duke told interviewer Harvey Cohen ("Duke Ellington's America") why he often assured his audience he loved them madly: "I gets a giggle every now and then, but it's true. I love those people madly. . . . You go up there and they respond and you can try it. . . . Oh, maybe 30 years ago I used to think, 'I work for myself. I express me.' And an artist has to please himself first. But . . . when somebody else happens to care what you're doing too, this brings on a land of understanding that is the nearest thing there is to sex, because people do not indulge themselves together unless they hold this is the time."
The final time I heard from Duke was in April 1974. He was in the infirmary for what turned out to be a fatal illness. Visitors told me that Duke, in bed, was still composing. And that April, I-as did others he knew-received a Christmas card from him.
I was startled but not surprised. He always preferable to see ahead, and in character he wouldn't be round in December, he was bringing seasons's greetings while he could. I was down at what I took to be "Goodbye." He died in May.
What came second to me as I looked at that bill was what sideman Clark Terry told me: "Duke wants life and medicine to constantly be a nation of becoming. He doesn't even like definitive song endings to a piece. He'd often ask us to follow up with ideas for closings, but when we'd settled on one of them, he'd keep fooling with it. He always likes to form the end of a vocal sound as if it's going somewhere."
Duke Ellington is, of course, still with us. For many about the world, it's always renewing to give ourselves to his music, as it keeps us going.
Mr. Hentoff writes about love for the Journal.
And I was there when he played dances, just to get as near to the stand as I could. One night, the band played a number entirely new to me. During one of their quick breaks I whispered to a sideman, baritone saxophonist Harry Carney, "What's the figure of that?"
"I don't know," he said. "He only wrote it."
Another sideman, Rex Stewart, who
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment